


come ease my slumber

by gdgdbaby



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Soulmates, Sickfic, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-19 09:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13120995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gdgdbaby/pseuds/gdgdbaby
Summary: Tommy starts sniffling on Thursday afternoon.





	come ease my slumber

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laliandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laliandra/gifts).



> merry christmas, lal! please enjoy this tiny story about three media moguls and cofounders who happen to be soulbonded to one another.
> 
> background pairings include emily/jon, ronan/lovett, and hanna/tommy, so if you aren't into that, maybe skip this one! title from slumber by lewis watson.

Tommy starts sniffling on Thursday afternoon. For about an hour, Jon hopes — nay, _prays_ that that's all it's going to be. Like, maybe they're just allergy symptoms, and they'll go away if Tommy takes some Claritin and avoids pollen-heavy trails with Lucca for a while. It'll be fine. This too shall pass.

Then, around half past four, Jon feels the tickle of Tommy's next sneeze in the back of his own throat, and thinks, _shit_.

Lovett's dismay stampedes through Jon's head two seconds later, and Jon touches a hand to his temple, wincing. "Come on," Lovett says, sitting straight up in his chair and turning to stare at Tommy. "Really? No. This isn't happening."

Tommy blinks blearily, pulls the carton of tissues closer to himself as he blows his nose. "Maybe it won't be contagious this time," he mumbles. "I'll go pick up some bond blockers from CVS tonight."

"You know those things never work," Jon says. "They'll just make our heads feel all cottony, and then we won't be able to get anything done."

"What's going on?" Dan says from the couch, brow furrowed with concern.

"Tommy's sick," Jon says, "and Lovett and I can feel it, which means we're definitely going to get sick, too."

Lovett groans, slouching back and rubbing his hands over his eyes. "Your immune system couldn't have waited four more days?"

Tommy sends him a pitiful glance. "I didn't choose this. It's not like I was like, 'hey, body, the last leg of our tour is this weekend, so it would be the perfect time to get sick.'"

"We know," Jon says, placating. "Just — hydrate, okay?"

He can feel Tommy trying desperately to mute his thread of the bond, wall himself off from the two of them, but every precedent dictates that there's no way he can stop this. It's like dominos, inevitable: once one of them falls, the rest go down too.

"Well," he mutters, staring blankly at his notes for Santa Barbara. "This is gonna be fun."

 

 

Sleep doesn't come easy for any of them, and by lunchtime on Friday, it's gotten so bad that Tommy has to miss the show, which totally sucks. Most of Lovett's ire has since turned into grudging sympathy. It's hard not to feel for Tommy when the grim progression of his cold is marching through all three of their heads, pinpricks of clammy achiness bleeding through everywhere.

The contact high from one of them being hopped up on DayQuil is always a wild experience. "We're very loose tonight," Lovett says on stage, voice cracking. For the next two hours, Jon alternates between feeling grounded in the moment and a free-wheeling buzz that's all Tommy. The hot lights pointed at them leave afterimages dancing behind Jon's eyes whenever he blinks.

When they get out of the show, Hanna's texted them pictures of Lucca snoozing on top of Tommy before her evening walk, so that part, at least, is cute as hell.

 

 

Tommy's lucid enough to join them on the flight to Sacramento on Saturday, but Lovett's flagging by the time they land at the airport. "Ugh," he says, voice thin and reedy with congestion. "Another one bites the dust."

Classically, Lovett's an awful sick person; he hates being forced to do anything, even when it's by his own body. Being on tour compounds the impulse to be contrary by several orders of magnitude. He keeps insisting that he doesn't need to rest, that he can just power through it, that he can help set up the merch table and adjust the mics on stage during sound check.

"You don't even do this part when you're well," Tanya says firmly, handing him a huge jug of Tropicana and herding him into one of the chairs to sit. "Let Corinne deal with the AV stuff."

Tommy finds Jon backstage later, squeezed in an armchair and scrolling through his iPad while Lovett half-dozes on the adjacent sofa. "Hasn't hit you yet?" he inquires. His cheekbones stand out in even starker relief than usual, casting little triangles of shadow on his face after two days of Saltine crackers and bland oatmeal.

Jon shakes his head. He's tired, sure, but the creeping cold hasn't quite reached him. "It's only a matter of time, though," he says quietly, and Tommy sends a thread of rueful apology through the bond, tinged with some of his residual headache. "Emily already told me that I'm bunking in the guest bedroom until I'm better, when we get back to LA."

It's an austerity measure leftover from before all of this began. Soulbond-borne illnesses generally aren't contagious the regular way, but still, sharing space with a sniffly, sweaty person isn't the greatest thing in the world.

At the hotel after the show that night, the three of them pile into the same bed in Jon's room anyway. Sickness is an exception to Lovett's pickiness about casual touch. The logic seems to be that if sleeping is going to be miserable, they might as well be miserable together, and something about being close to one another always helps diminish the terrible feedback loop of two colds and one soon-to-be-compromised immune system bouncing off each other. They figured that one out pretty early on.

Looking back years later, it's still impossible to pinpoint when exactly it happened. Certainly not the first time they spoke over the phone, trying to fix Jon's shitty faux pas with the Hillary cutout; there was still a heavy dose of mutual mistrust and distaste between them then, and they definitely would have noticed. But somewhere down the line, when they were all putting in crazy hours doing some of the most rewarding work of their lives, the universe decided, for reasons unknown, that they ought to be a little closer.

It was hard to tell for a few different reasons. At the time, they were all going through the hectic ups and downs of the same administration, so it was easy to assume their feelings were their own when the broader context for those emotions were often shared. And soulbonds, according to conventional wisdom, were muscles just like any other. Without the right exercise, or constant use, sometimes you didn't even realize they were there.

Tommy figured it out first and didn't say anything for months, which was just Tommy all over: quiet in observation, anxious about complications, patient almost to a fault, always waiting until he was absolutely sure about something before revealing his hand. He might have kept it to himself forever, except that Jon met Emily over the summer, and Lovett had a minor crisis of sexuality that Tommy had to explain by saying, don't worry, you're still gay. The two guys you're sharing headspace with now, though — not so much.

"It will probably take at least a little while for you to adjust," the in-house counselor told them at the emergency meeting Jon arranged, "but platonic soulbonds aren't uncommon, and you gentlemen seem to have good heads on your shoulders. It shouldn't be a problem."

"I don't understand how this happened," Lovett lamented, though the overwhelming feeling Jon could glean from Lovett wasn't panic or distress, he thought, but sharp curiosity, tangy on Jon's tongue. "I don't even like you guys that much."

Dr. Harris raised her eyebrows, reading the room. "Would you like a prescription for bond blockers?"

They tried those for a grand total of one day and immediately made a unanimous decision never to do it again, after Cody had to spend the next morning rewriting every page Jon or Lovett touched of the President's remarks on the debt ceiling debate.

"I guess we'll just have to get used to this," Tommy told them that weekend, when they were trying to process everything at his and Lovett's apartment. He proceeded to hand Jon his own personal twelve-pack of beer to cope. Their shared hangover the next morning had been colossal but worth it.

By the time Lovett and Ronan started seeing each other, Jon had finally gotten used to waking up in the middle of the night to one of Lovett's Final Fantasy triumphs, or jolting awake in bed far too early because Tommy's 5AM caffeine intake had bled over through the bond. Which wasn't to say that it was all bad — some of it was pretty great, actually, like being able to tell when Lovett genuinely appreciated one of Jon's jokes or a particular turn of phrase, the burst of his favor settling like a blanket around Jon's shoulders. Like the way Tommy felt when he met Hanna for the first time, the uninhibited rush of it sweet and clear, like birdsong in Jon's ear.

They've come a long way since then: finer control and years of experience mean that Jon can feel the exact moment when Lovett stirs next to Tommy in the hotel bed, can reach out with his mind and smooth over the fissures of discomfort radiating from both of them. Jon's going to be sick soon, but he isn't, yet. The least he can do is try to make it easier on the others.

 

 

"I thought you guys were joking about sharing a king-sized bed," Erin says drily, when she stops by his room on Sunday to see if they're up for brunch.

"Technically, it's a queen," Lovett calls from inside, and then there's a muffled honking noise as he blows his nose.

"We were, and then Tommy got sick," Jon says, rubbing his knuckles against one eyelid. Erin makes a face like she'd rather not know how those two things are connected, which is just as well. "His stomach is rebelling right now, and I think putting any food in mine would make it worse, so. Next time."

"You could've just gone," Tommy says, when Jon comes back. "We would've been okay."

Jon shrugs. "Would've been weird without you," he says, and settles in between them again, scrolling through his phone. Emily's sent him a photo of Pundit and Leo lying at the foot of their bed, and Jon snaps a picture of the three of them, Lovett tucked against his shoulder with his eyes closed, Tommy frowning for the camera.

 _poor babies :(_ , she shoots back, and then: _love u, see u soon._

"Stop being gross and sappy in my head, Favreau," Lovett mumbles, but the only thing Jon feels filtering through the bond is fondness, so he can't be too mad.

 

 

Halfway through their Q&A at Berkeley on Monday afternoon, Jon feels himself starting to sweat at the armpits. He pops a couple of preemptive Tylenol on the van ride to the theater, manages to power through the Oakland show and a fruitless hour-long wait at the Cheesecake Factory with Erin and Lovett, but his head is swimming when they shuffle through the revolving doors of their hotel in San Francisco that night.

In their room, Tommy's already folded up against the headboard with his laptop. "This is the worst," Jon announces. Something's stabbing behind his eyes from temple to temple, knifing white-hot, and it feels like the entire upper half of his body is blocked up with mucus. He changes into more comfortable clothes, collapses onto the bed — a king, this time, which gives Lovett more room to kick — and pushes his face halfway into one of the pillows.

Lovett crawls in next to him, curls up in a ball, moaning quietly. "We're gonna kill you when we're better, Tommy," he mumbles, turning into Jon's side.

"Sorry, sorry, I know it's all my fault," Tommy says, mostly recovered at this point, and pulls the starched sheets over them. Jon hears a knock on the door a couple minutes later, and Tommy comes back armed with two gallons of water, a box of tissues, and NyQuil LiquiCaps. "Dan stopped by with some stuff."

"I love Dan," Lovett says, heartfelt. "He's my favorite cohost."

"You don't even host with him," Tommy says, laughing.

"Semantics," Lovett says, brandishing one hand wildly over his head.

"Uh huh," Tommy says. Jon watches him pour out two glasses of water and fumble with the NyQuil. Gel pills never go down easy; the one Jon swallows feels like it lodges somewhere in the vicinity of his diaphragm, even though he knows, intellectually, that it'll make it to his stomach eventually.

He twists onto his side, breathing through his mouth, and feels Tommy settle behind him, one arm coming up to fit around his waist. Tommy's presence feels like IcyHot in Jon's head, a cool, tingling patch against the base of Jon's skull. He wonders idly what it feels like for Lovett; not all sensations manifest in the same way, even if the intent behind them is uniform. Maybe Tommy feels warm for him; Lovett's started shivering, a fine tremor rippling through his body and his mind. Jon slings his arm over Lovett's middle and tries to push past the NyQuil working its way through his system, channel a bit of the heat in his head through to Lovett.

"Get some rest, guys," Tommy murmurs, voice echoing. Lovett's too tired to even put up a token protest. Jon closes his eyes and dreams of nothing at all.

 

 

Flying is always terrible, but at least Jon's too woozy and exhausted to think about it much on the way back to LA. Tommy loads all their suitcases into one Lyft after they land, and when Jon opens his eyes again they're at his house, quiet and empty because Emily took the dogs to work with her.

Jon's guzzling Emergen-C and tabbing through articles when she gets home that evening. Lovett's looking for people for Jon to fight on Twitter, feet propped up on the coffee table, and Tommy has his nose stuck in _American Radical_. Pundit curls against Lovett's leg on the couch and promptly falls asleep. Leo bounds over to sniff at Jon's feet, and Jon bends down to gather him up into his lap.

"Just like old times," Emily says, toeing her heels off at the door and smiling. "I'm not gonna lie, I kinda missed this." She slides over and presses a judicious kiss into Jon's hair. "Maybe you should get sick more often."

"Nope," they say in unison, and Tommy cracks up, shaking his head.

"Okay, maybe not," she concedes. "I'm just glad you made it through the weekend mostly alive."

"We aren't out of the woods yet," Lovett says darkly into a tissue, but he lets Emily lean down to drop a kiss on his curls, too, and the pressure in Jon's head eases up a little.

 

 

Ronan flies in at the end of the week for his, Shannon, and Juliet's annual birthday karaoke. The theme is black tie pajamas this year, so Jon and Emily go in pin-striped, monogrammed ones that they got each other for Christmas a couple years back. It's a fun time with fun people, music loud and alcohol flowing, the breadth of Lovett's happiness washing over Jon like the tide. Lovett's finally recovered enough that he doesn't sound quite so congested when he's belting the lyrics of _Tainted Love_ into the microphone he's holding aloft.

"Thanks for putting up with him this week," Ronan says later, when they're making the rounds, and laughs when Lovett lets out a deeply disgruntled noise.

Jon shrugs, grinning back. "Our pleasure," he says, and then: "He's your problem now."

When they get home around midnight, Emily fishes Lovett's keys out of her purse, dangles them in Jon's face. "His stormtrooper onesie didn't have pockets," she says, the corner of her mouth twitching.

"Of course it didn't." He feels it in his head when Lovett realizes they're missing, the burst of panic in the back of his mouth and the answering question from Tommy. _don't worry, em still has your keys_ , he types into their WhatsApp group chat, and smiles when Lovett sends him a relieved emoji. "We can give them to him on Monday."

The last of the head cold has trickled away by then, and Lovett brings up the keys when they're reading the ad copy for Trackr. "Keep better track of your belongings, Lovett," Jon says, and grins when Lovett narrows his eyes.

"In my defense, I was still physically incapacitated by the worst cold I've had in years, and whose fault was that?"

Tommy huffs. "Are you ever gonna let this go?"

"Have you met me?" Lovett says, cocking his head to the side.

"I regret it every day," Tommy says somberly.

"Liar," Lovett replies, and he doesn't laugh, but his mirth is like a ray of sunshine tracking across the floor on a warm day. Jon settles back in his chair and smiles into his palm, can't help it. He feels good.


End file.
